Neil Kane

Neil Kane, the Director of Undergraduate Entrepreneurship at Michigan State University, is a leading authority on technology commercialization and innovation and has the battle scars to prove it. He was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2007. His Twitter handle is @neildkane. He’s also on Google+ and LinkedIn.

Recent posts by this Author

Raising venture capital or angel financing are the sought-after ways of enabling your startup dream. The process of raising venture capital is time consuming, and at the end of the day, you’ll give up anywhere between 30-60 percent of your company in your first...

A few years ago I attended a workshop called Situational Leadership by the great Paul Hersey. He’s the guy who wrote the book on situational leadership. I was really looking forward to the workshop because another lecturer in the class was Marshall Goldsmith (his...

With Passover approaching, this refrain may be familiar to some of you. The Four Questions that get asked during the Passover reading of the haggadah are: Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights, we eat leavened products and...

Suppose your company has 8 million shares outstanding and you’re fortunate enough to be able to raise $4 million at an $8 million pre-money valuation in your Series A. That’s a $12 million post-money valuation and each share is valued at $1.00. You continue...

One of the people in my networking group in Chicago posed this question: How do your teams structure yourselves so that people are compensated fairly and encouraged to do their best work? The ensuing online discussion inevitably turned toward how to create a working...

I was fortunate early in my career to get some valuable, but simple advice. I don’t remember where it came from – probably from some motivational speaker or maybe the Dale Carnegie Course, since I spent my first few years out of college immersed...

In late 2000, I was raising a seed-stage venture fund to commercialize innovations coming from universities and federal laboratories in the Midwestern part of the United States. During that time, I attended a function at the Union League Club in Chicago. While I was...

As you develop your business, you may discover that you either need to license technology into your company to augment your product development efforts, or create a new revenue stream by licensing technology that you’ve developed to other people. A license is a contract...

In the days before satellite radio, smartphones, and iPods, I devoured books on tape while driving. My first job was at IBM in San Jose (where they had a large manufacturing facility). They had a library with a whole bunch of business books on...

Startups go out of business for only one reason. That reason is – all together now, repeat after me – “because they run out of money.” And that raises the eternal question, “How much money do I need to raise?” You need more than...